6.26.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

So Far Gone, So Far Forward: A Dispatch of Possibility from a Baltimore Classroom

Aliemma Kanu, Radical Teacher

This poetic prose interweaves verse and reflection from the first day of school in West Baltimore to confront national narratives that declare cities like mine “so far gone.” Against rhetoric that frames Black-led communities as beyond repair, and amid program cuts following the federal rollback of post-COVID education funds, Baltimore classrooms continue to generate resilience, creativity, and possibility. Drawing on literacy and math gains that outpaced state averages, and the opening of the first STEAM lab in West Baltimore, I challenge deficit framings that erase student achievement and joy.

“Education without national consciousness is not education”: Palestinian teachers’ quiet revolution against the ongoing Nakba

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Jo Kelcey, & Maria Abunnasr, Curriculum Inquiry

In this article, we explore the centrality of education in the struggle for Palestinian liberation by analyzing the role that Palestinian teachers working for UNRWA in Lebanon have played as quiet revolutionaries. We draw on an oral history project with now retired Palestinian teachers. The lives of these teachers span Palestinian history since the Nakba: they were born amidst the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, became teachers when the Palestinian national movement was at its height (during the 1960s and 1970s), and taught through the Lebanese civil war (1975 –1990), including Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon (1978–2000). We analyze how these teachers navigated the, often ambiguous, role that education played in their community’s struggle and how these teachers adapted their pedagogies and practices to resist Palestinian dispossession.

Constructing Dominant Narratives: Twitter, Public Discourse, and the Politics of an Educational Organization in Controversy

Jasmine Pham, Jami Carmichael, Carrie Sampson, and Ruth M. López, AERA Open

This study examines how discourse on Twitter shaped public perceptions of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) following its 2021 letter to the Biden administration requesting federal assistance amid threats at school board meetings. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and the concept of political spectacle, we examined 447 tweets posted over the course of 1 year to uncover the dominant narratives and the discursive strategies Twitter users employed. Our findings reveal that Twitter users employed strategies such as misrepresentation and selective emphasis to construct a dominant narrative portraying the NSBA as a “woke” organization that colluded with the Biden administration to target parents. These narratives coincided with widespread backlash and the withdrawal of multiple state associations from the NSBA. This research highlights the powerful role of social media in shaping educational politics and policy discourse, offering insights into how digital platforms mediate public understanding and influence institutional legitimacy.

Language, Culture, and Power

Once designed to strip Native students of culture, this school now safeguards it [Audio]

Sequoia Carrillo, NPR

The Santa Fe Indian School sits off a short road in the middle of the New Mexico city. Its half dozen stucco buildings blend into the flat, dusty landscape around it. “We were established in 1890 as a Native American boarding school,” Kyle Shutiva, a junior at the school, says. “It’s still a boarding school, but not how people would expect.” For more than a century federal Indian boarding schools worked to break tribal bonds by isolating children from their families and forbidding traditional practices. SFIS’s campus, like many boarding schools of its kind, has a painful history. There are stories of forced assimilation and harsh punishment for students speaking their Native languages from its earliest days – but this school developed differently.

DACA renewal delays fuel worries Trump is quietly undermining ‘Dreamers’

Eric Bazail-Eimil, Politico

Concerns are mounting on Capitol Hill and among immigration advocates that the Trump administration is quietly gutting a landmark program allowing unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to stay, work and study legally in the United States. A major immigrant rights advocacy group recently documented in a study that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is taking months longer on average to renew legal protections for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, often referred to as “Dreamers.” Those delays are causing some supporters of the program on Capitol Hill to worry the Trump administration is weaponizing bureaucracy to undermine DACA.

Why ICE Raids Connect Me to My Father

Priscilla Preciado, Zocalo

Over 30 years ago, the man who would become my father, then a 21-year-old Chicano, glided through Tustin, where he had recently moved, in his Chevy Super Sport Impala. The bright summer day made his prized ’65 glisten down the scorching asphalt of the street. With four of his friends in tow and in search of food, my father drove to a 7-Eleven. A cop soon began following him. At first, just one cop car signaled my father to pull into the parking lot, but soon one car became two, then four, and then the parking lot was enshrouded by sirens. My dad’s slicked jet-black hair, caramel skin, and commanding presence stood out amid the white skin that primarily populated Tustin. He was covered in ink. War’s “The World Is a Ghetto” blasted from his lowrider’s speakers. The cops most likely believed they’d hit the jackpot: a cholo, uneducated, most likely a criminal. They unjustly searched his car.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

How children became this city’s lead detectors

Sarah Carr, Hechinger Report

When a doctor told Domininck Tompkins that her 1-year-old’s lead level was too high, she immediately suspected her child was being poisoned at their home, a poorly maintained rental with chipping paint. A few weeks later, when her landlord pulled up in her truck to collect the rent, Tompkins told the woman about a letter from the city confirming that lead detected in her daughter’s body posed significant health risks for the girl. Tompkins recalled that the landlord uttered just three words as she rolled up her window: “I don’t care.” After that, Tompkins said, the landlord always sent someone else to collect the rent.

Windows Are Open and Shoes Are Off, but Class Is Still On in Extreme Heat

Amelia Nierenberg and Ségolène Le Stradic, New York Times

London’s schools, some decades or over a century old, are baking in 90-degree heat. In France, teachers have covered windows with blankets or chalk and let children play in water outside. Most students are just glad to kick off their shoes. “I feel like I’m in an oven,” said one of them, Raya Petrova, 7, whose teachers were desperate to keep their London classrooms cool without air-conditioning. “It is really hot.” Extreme heat is broiling much of western Europe, but class is still in session for millions of students in countries such as Britain and France, where few schools are air-conditioned. The heat has trapped education officials between trying to avoid school closures, which mean lost learning days, and the effects of high temperatures, which research shows can affect learning outcomes and test scores.

Health concerns mount as Boyle Heights warehouse fire stretches into a week

Tony Briscoe, Kori McNair and Mack Baysinger, Los Angeles Times

Tens of thousands of people in southeast Los Angeles County have been engulfed in a dense cloud of smoke for nearly a week as a fire continues to tear through a massive refrigerated warehouse in Boyle Heights. Toxic air has covered the San Gabriel Valley and beyond at times, as the fire continues to burn and the wind shifts the pall in different directions. People have reason to be concerned about their loved ones breathing in the plume, experts say. “There’s no safe level of exposure to particle pollution,” said Will Barrett, assistant vice president for nationwide clean air policy at the American Lung Assn.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

HHS removes nearly one-fifth of sessions from early childhood research conference

Researchers fear political screening after abrupt cancellations

Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

Nine research sessions disappeared from the agenda of one of the nation’s most important early childhood education conferences less than a week before it was set to begin after an unprecedented intervention by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the conference sponsor. The removals affected almost a fifth of the 48 sessions at the three-day National Research Conference on Early Childhood in Arlington, Virginia, scheduled to start tomorrow. Researchers said they were notified by email on June 16 that their sessions had been removed during HHS’s final review of the conference agenda. . The cancellations are unusual because the presentations had been selected months earlier through a peer-review process after proposals were submitted last fall. Presenters were told only that “several revisions were required” as part of the department’s clearance process. 

I Thought ‘No Child Left Behind’ Would Fix Public Schools. I Was Wrong.

Ross Weiner, New York Times

New data from Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project confirms what close observers already knew: America’s test scores are slipping. The pandemic worsened the decline, but the slide began years before. In one-third of school districts, students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015. The new data is emboldening calls to restore something like the No Child Left Behind Act, the stringent, test-based accountability policy that defined American education from 2002 to 2015 and imposed penalties on schools whose students did not meet proficiency requirements on state standardized tests. The Atlantic captured that impulse in a 2025 podcast episode titled “Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing.”

How Can We Reimagine Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change?

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Nation

What might it mean to reimagine higher education in the face of climate change? How will colleges adapt, not just to environmental catastrophe but all the other challenges to civic life: from AI and increasing automation to deepening political divides and wealth inequality. The Massachusetts-based Gull Island Institute offers an education that attempts to answer some of these questions. Its mission is to prepare a new generation for democratic citizenship on a changing planet through place-based learning rooted in rigorous academics, physical labor, and student self-governance. To this end, students participate in seminars focused on Western and Indigenous traditions and the history and ecology of the region, alongside daily labor rotations including aquaculture, land conservation, cooking, and sustainable gardening. Tuition and room-and-board are free of charge to students.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Over 800,000 Kids Thrown Off SNAP Since Passage of GOP’s Big Ugly Bill: Analysis

Brad Reed, Common Dreams​

An analysis updated Monday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that millions of people, including more than 800,000 children, have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits since Republicans’ 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act took effect. In total, CBPP estimates that “SNAP participation nationwide fell by more than 4 million people (10%) between the law’s July 2025 enactment and March 2026,” with declines “especially pronounced” in Arizona, which has seen enrollment fall by more than 50%.

New Justice Department memo questions decades of protections for people with disabilities [Video]

Ali Rogan, PBS Newshour

A recently released Justice Department memo questions decades of protections for Americans with disabilities. It’s the latest effort by the Trump administration to shift longstanding practices for the disability community, attempting to change services and policies. Ali Rogin speaks with Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, for more.

California schools more economically segregated than 40 other states’ [Audio]

Katie Hyson and Carolyne Corelis, KPBS

Schools in California are more divided between rich and poor than in 40 other states in the country, according to a new report. That segregation is occurring both between school districts and within them. Nationally, it’s worse than it was three decades ago. This matters because schools with higher concentrations of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch tend to have higher teacher turnover rates and worse educational outcomes, said Stephen Owens, policy director for the Brown’s Promise project, which co-authored the study. “I was a teacher for five years,” he said. “If you have one child in your 25 that you’re teaching that’s having a difficult time or who has a lot of needs that are being unmet at home, that can be treated as like, ‘OK, how can we support this human? If 20 of your 25 kids are disregulated … It’s hard to learn if so many of your classmates are dealing with those unmet needs.”

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Battle to Tell Black History

Brian Jones, Hammer and Hope

When Joe Biden signed a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021, the decision stirred mixed emotions among Black Americans. On the one hand, the nation was finally acknowledging the end of slavery as a crucial moment of revolutionary rebirth in U.S. history. On the other hand, a cherished ritual in many Black communities was suddenly everybody’s business — and plenty of racist coworkers and neighbors who would never get invited to the cookout now got a day off. At that very moment, however, the right-wing assault that would go into overdrive during Donald Trump’s second presidency was threatening all of Black history in Republican-controlled legislatures around the country. “In the boundless satire that is the United States of America,” Jesse Hagopian wrote in Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, “Juneteenth — the oldest commemoration of the ending of slavery — became a federal holiday at the same time legislators were making it [illegal] to teach about the origins of the commemoration in many states, including in Texas, where the holiday originates.”

“Hay puros blanquitos casi” (“There are almost all whites”): Families’ raced and classed experiences with school choice and exclusion

Melanie Bertrand, Carrie Sampson, Ronnie Chavez, Christina Bustos, and Brooke Moreno, Teachers College Record

School choice policies have expanded rapidly across the United States over the past several decades, especially in the state of Arizona. Research suggests that widespread school choice policies have had negative consequences for minoritized families. However, more research is needed to better understand the experiences of minoritized families with school choice policies.

We examine a specialized public school in Arizona with high out-of-district open enrollment, located within a gentrifying, working-class community of color. Using the lenses of Whiteness as Property and racial capitalism, we highlight how racial, legal, and economic forces led families of color to be displaced and dispossessed of rights to equitable access to schools. We respond to the following research question: How do race and social class shape families’ experiences with a school embedded in a district that is navigating and leveraging Arizona’s competitive school choice environment?

Citizenship education: primary school children are already able to think politically

Rebecca Simpson-Hargreaves, The Conversation

Rebuilding social cohesion and democratic trust has become a key concern in British politics, amid increasing political polarisation, misinformation and declining trust in public institutions. Schools are often seen as part of the solution, helping children learn how to participate in civic life and live alongside others.Yet children are rarely included in discussions about citizenship, political participation and rights. They are often treated as citizens in waiting, learning about “British values” – a government-defined framework taught in England’s schools that includes the rule of law, and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs, in preparation for future participation in society.

Other News of Note

That’s How Change Happens

Dave Zirin and Andrew Holter, Boston Review

Has any single book drawn more Americans leftward over the last half century than A People’s History of the United States? Howard Zinn was not the first to write about Bartolomé de las Casas, the Flour Riot of 1837, the Teller Amendment, or MKULTRA, but no historian before him had been so audacious as to compile these and other subjects into a sweeping page-turner on national rapacity and popular resistance. Conservatives are still saying that what A People’s History did to this country will take decades to remediate. The federal government has set itself to the task, and one imagines that in the drafty shell of Linda McMahon’s Department of Education, amid the fire sales of office furniture and summary sackings, a Two Minutes Hate is observed each morning before a massive projection of Zinn’s twinkly visage.